Klinsmann Gives A Few Minutes To Dallas Reporters

It was a quick trip to the Big D for United States Men’s National team coach Jurgen Klinsmann on Sunday. The US boss was on hand for the MLS season opener between FC Dallas and the New York Red Bulls. He also was there to scarf Uncle Lamar’s statue in the North Gate at FC Dallas Stadium.

The spoke briefly to a few reporters before the game and offered up a few interesting nuggets. Klinsmann was definitely keeping tabs on some of the younger guys in MLS on Sunday with the likes of Brek Shea, Juan Agudelo, George John and Zach Loyd on the field.

“We empower the players to be the driving force so when Brek comes in or hopefully George comes in hopefully the next time or stuff like that or Zach Loyd comes in we say you guys are in the driver’s seat. You’ve got to show us how much you want this, how far you can go, how much you’re able to suffer and obviously your qualities that are given to you that you worked hard on many, many years. There is a lot of special talent coming through the ranks in the U.S. or even youngsters all over the world that have U.S. passports. That was never the case in soccer 10 years ago,” said Klinsmann.

But looking further into the talent pool, Klinsmann mentioned how important players in Mexico are to the growth of the national team.

“We basically have a bigger roster. We have obviously 20-25 right now that we feel very comfortable with but there’s an even more extended roster we fill with the January camp players, a lot of them and stuff. Herculez is part of them. I mean all the kids that play in Mexico and other places, we have them all on the radar screen. The Mexican clubs are pretty kind of surprised that we have our coaches go down to Mexico. We’ve never had that before. We look at them all the time and what we still have to figure out at the end of the day is what is the internal ranking for us? We go into May, June and we have 22 spots and we’ve got to make the best out of it. There’s an established ranking in every national team program. They’re there for a reason. It doesn’t mean that you kind of downsize anybody else. It is because the spot is taken.”